Review: ‘The Mandalorian Season 2’ #2 – ‘Chapter 10: The Passenger’ Works Even Better As a Comic
The Passenger was probably the most maligned episode of The Mandalorian‘s second season, accused of being a “filler” episode when everyone was expecting the show to kick on and find new Mandalorians for Din to interact with. What fans got instead was a self-contained adventure, with Din and Frog Lady racing to survive a night on a frozen planet with hordes of deadly spider creatures.
Even though the episode didn’t move the plot along, it did provide a lot of entertaining action during that escape sequence and some hilarity as Din demanded that Grogu stop eating Frog Lady’s eggs. All of this remains in the comic, and the story told in the original episode feels almost better suited to this medium.
This smaller scale story works perfectly as a one-shot comic; if The Passenger had never been released on Disney Plus and instead went straight to print as a one-shot, it wouldn’t have felt out of place. The issue adds nothing new to the story it’s adapting — it’s difficult to imagine how it could — so it was never going to be hailed as recommended reading, like a lot of one-shot Star Wars comics hampered by the need to tell a smaller scale story that doesn’t affect the events of the films and series, but it does feel like a natural fit regardless.
The artwork is pretty great — a noteable upgrade on some of the less detailed artwork in the previous issue, particularly scenes involving Peli Motto — adding to the idea that this story is well suited as a comic. It’s a fun read for any fans like myself who may have skipped over this episode during past rewatches of The Mandalorian, as I definitely forgot about the Tatooine skirmish at the beginning that ends with the fantastic gag of the scavenger shooting off into the sky when claiming Din’s jetpack. The gag can’t quite replicate the shocking hilarity of the source material, but it’s still plenty amusing to read on the page and captures the excitement well.
When it comes to the later action in the episodes, the artwork captures the terrifying look of the spider creatures expertly and even adds a note of humor at one point as the giant spider’s eyes widen in surprise when it gets caught in an explosion from Mando’s proximity mines.
Otherwise, the rest of the comic folds out exactly as it does in the original episode. There are no great leaps taken to expand the story, but it’s fortunate that the source material works well in this medium. It’s difficult to recommend a comic directly adapting something we’ve already seen on TV, but as comic adaptions go this is one is pretty good.
Rating: 7/10
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
